A Game of Dying
by Losselen
Summary: Midnight perches on his chest like glistening silver. Sephiroth x Vincent


TITLE: A Game of Dying  
PAIRING: Sephiroth/Vincent  
RATING: R  
SUMMARY: Midnight perches on his chest like glistening silver.  
NOTES: For Vincent's brithday.

* * *

It was a game in the eyes.

And looking back, back, back, and this cruel laugh in the echoes, spaces between the walls called windows or something else. The mansion is hollow, a dark bastion in the full flow of strange autumn with its sounds drawn flat and outrageous and dead; a caved-in world of dust and rustles, _no soul_. So is his voice, his hair like dark turnings when he stands at the edge of the room, back to the light so you wouldn't see anything, no shape or contour and just a vague presence, a solidity under a well of light. So for a second he'll almost seem like a godsend with a bright nimbus and eyes like fire, rutilant with divinity beyond life and wings behind him, _angel_. Seraphim of gold, body so bright that he has to have wings to shield his eyes from himself—a fretful beating, trembling.

_pictured so many times what it should have been like, with her hand in mine and the child between us, a shallow breath_

And really, it was a game of dying.

People like him never die easily.

Or even properly with a cave of mahogany lowered into the abyss in the ground—scar in the earth—while overhead there are bugle-trills and low drums and cello-mourning, with lemongrass swallowing his body and flowers in summer suns by the headstone, and the explosion of curling stems over the intaglio, whispering. Whispering.

Instead he dies in a box, over and over to the sound of dreams when night rises and falls and rises again, giving away to perhaps nothing and perhaps the small accidents of hawkcries and rain and light too faint. And then waking up in the tumbling apocalypse.

His hand glints in the sun.

Or the moon, in fact, or the lights of the laboratory in which silver hair floats in green mako like many-fingers, like spider webs.

This futile body of a man or unman bathed in this eerie halo, so for an instant, it is an angel of another sort in a neon lagoon; such a numbness in his eyes it seems like he is dead, seems like he's died a thousand times.

And maybe he breathes.

* * *

Midnight perches on his chest like glistening silver.

And he sees through the night, through the dawn. Through mouth of the man in the green sea whose eyes are open in the same color. Sephiroth's body had a linger of fever over it and when the greenwater seeps off, Vincent kneels over him and gathers him into his arms. "Sephiroth," he coos, voice drawn and at first he thinks he is dreaming.

"Sephiroth." _a seraph, bow-bodied and lyre-winged_

He lies there naked and not asleep.

So Vincent takes his hands into his own and pretends that they are delicate, pretends that they are his mother's, cages made of crystal and skin of glass; pretends that they hold mark pens instead of swords; pretends that when they come together it is in prayer instead of murder, _prayer instead of murder._

And Vincent takes his mouth into his own, takes the brooks and the turns, lost runnels in the mountain like efflorescing stones. The bared throat. Pale with delicate workings underneath the skin like an apple for the harvest and Vincent would trace it in small circles with both his hands and leave his own reddish symmetry. What a picture it would make: a metal claw on the neck.

(And skin is pale.)

Skin is like paper, like snowed, moonkissed valleys over wild mountains. Vincent's metal hand leaves marks over it, leaves illustrations in crimson of autumn leaves. His mouth traces rills on the skin like a ranger on a trail; he'll say: You are wrong. he'll say: You are not who you are.

And Vincent takes the belt from his Uniform to the throat and suddenly the eyes bloom bright like pretty flowers in the sun, and suddenly the mouth opens in a hitch and neck in an arc and Vincent's flesh-hand is still laced knotted with the fingers.

_but oh love, i remember you from times i've never been alive_

No, not really, it was never, really.

Sephiroth is writhing, he has seen death behind his eyelids and he knows that it is seeping from his skin so he struggles and struggles under the bare hands because that is what people, they toil. They are like blind beasts. Or rats, rats of the Maze.

Vincent is not smiling with such a dangerous smile and not laughing with sorrow but only a reverent kiss, only a rhythm to the body. It is only a burning, only a word infused with life, only a simple absurdity. It is like a dance, really, a stale taste in his tongue from sultry residues of Sephiroth's body, it is unlovely and beautiful.

O but blind?

_It seems rather silly that the closest two people can come to is only a lustful frustration._

And death calls us children like a father calls a son.

* * *

He is of the silent thoughts.

And he will deceive himself into thinking that there is beauty in the world unsullied by stains or the ugly blow of sex but he doesn't believe it himself and who else can convince him if he can't do it himself…

_no soul, no thinker behind the thought_

in a circle, stupid, poetic thoughts about the ending being the beginning, about the snake biting the tail and so coming back again, renewed, alive with burning. But what of deadmen?

_and the hero in the story, the bloodstained cloakstranger with dark eyes and full whirl of cape flapping, with soft mouth and soft jaws and a voice too light to remember or forget, he heard the hitching shrill and turned back, shining_

but he dies in the end.

He always dies in the end.

He draws out his gun of metal, points, aims. The forehead is gleaming with sweat and the breath is shallow like a baby.

_Your soul is a temptation._

Click.

He wants to say: "O my darling child, you're beautiful."

Empty.

_click_—he simply laughs.


End file.
